Category: Canada

Anything related to Canada or Canadians

2019 Canadian federal election debate

It didn’t have a strong effect on my view of the situation: that Trudeau has been a poor prime minister on the most important issues, that Scheer would be worse, and that everyone else is scrambling for a few parliamentary seats in hopes of being influential in a minority government. So far the most interesting idea of the campaign has been the Green Party proposal for an all-party climate change cabinet. It makes a lot of sense to put decisions about long-term energy and infrastructure planning, as well as climate change adaptation, under a body that will take a broader view across the decades instead of responding principally to day-to-day developments.

September 27th Climate Strike

After attending half of a classmate’s job talk for a law and political science position at Guelph I photographed today’s Climate Strike in Toronto. It was a big organic crowd, with some contingents from labour or specific causes who were clearly together but where most people carried home-made signs which didn’t come out of a print shop or an activists’ art build.

It’s good to see the level of concern, which is perhaps hardening into a willingness to demand action. That’s what it will take with a government as deferential to industry as Canada’s is. If Justin Trudeau hadn’t twisted a little to help SNC-Lavalin that would certainly have been the default approach in Canada’s civil service, which exists in symbiosis with the industries which it is meant to regulate. They fall over themselves to bail out the automobile industry, so the scale of changes necessary to address climate change is broadly unthinkable to them: totally outside the scope of what they see as possible to implement. They’re also the guardians of federalism, so the inter-provincial dynamics of fossil fuel and climate change politics are frightening to them, strengthening a trained impulse to generally try to muddle through with as little fundamental change as possible.

Preventing the worst effects of climate change now demands boldness far beyond what the Liberals and Conservatives are offering — perhaps more along the lines of what Green Party members whisper to each other during fearful conversations about climate change and the human future. The world of 2000 looked nothing like the world of 1900, and 2100 may be more different still. All of this can go: rapid transport options available to anyone with money, cities dominated by the private car, exotic foods in all seasons, cheap and automatic indoor climate control in summer and winter, suburbia. The populace takes it all for granted politically and ultimately emotionally, but it’s fragile. Indeed, it has never really been functioning in the way people thought, since the interactions between people behaving that way and the rest of the biosphere gradually erode away the web of life on which human survival depends. I think we’ll find that our personal options will inevitably be constrained in some ways in the future, which will produce a series of political fights which will make hyperbole about carbon taxes seem like gentle childhood provocation.

Hey, I tend to be a worrier though. Maybe Greta will provoke the world sufficiently to drive politicians everywhere to reverse their foolish commitment to continued fossil fuel dependence and implement the kind of rapid global decarbonization which is feasible with cooperation and cheap compared to suffering the effects of unconstrained climate change. The logical and ethical case for action is a slam dunk, it’s just hard to accept that we actually need to make sacrifices so that future generations won’t inherit a degraded world where changing global conditions continuously imperil them and in which the richness of life has been sharply circumscribed by our unwillingness to get over coal, oil, and gas at a rate that does justice to the inheritors of the Earth.

It’s also logically possible that some combination of technological development and political change will lead to the kind of mass renewable deployments being called for at rallies like today’s, and by organizations like 350.org. David MacKay’s book is convincing that there is enough renewable energy potential to give all the world’s billions of inhabitants a standard of living comparable to that in Europe today, based around a much more equitable distribution of global energy use.

Trudeau’s false radicalism

Geoff Dembicki has a piece out about how Trudeau’s method is to promise substantive reforms to voters, while privately comforting business with the understanding they won’t really be meaningful:

So on climate, for instance, he was presented as this kind of river-paddling environmental Adonis. He promised that fossil fuel projects wouldn’t go ahead without the permission of communities. But the Liberals create these public spectacles of their bold progressiveness while they quietly assure the corporate elite that their interests will be safeguarded. So at the same time Trudeau was going around the country and convincing people that he was this great climate hope, the Liberal party had for years been assuring big oil and gas interests that there would not be any fundamental change to the status quo.

…

The Liberal climate plan essentially is a reworking of the business plan of Big Oil and the broader corporate lobby. Most Canadians probably wouldn’t realize this because of the nature of coverage in the mainstream media and the polarized political debate about the carbon tax, but overwhelmingly there is an astonishing consensus among the corporate elite in support of a carbon tax.

The plan is to support a carbon tax and to effectively make it a cover for expanded tarsands production and pipelines. That was a plan hatched by the Business Council of Canada back in 2006, 2007. For 20 years oil companies had resisted any kind of regulation or any kind of carbon tax and fought it seriously. But they started to realize that it would be a kind of concession that they would have to make in order to assure stability and their bottom line not being harmed. The climate bargain that Trudeau went on to strike with Alberta of a carbon tax plus expanded tarsands production was precisely the deal that Big Oil had wanted.

For a long time, Canadians prioritizing climate change have had no effective political option. Under first-past-the-post Green and even NDP votes are often counterproductive protests. I’m wary about criticism of the Liberals increasing the odds of a Conservative win, but I don’t think we should lie either.

The environmental effectiveness of “green” funds

It seems like a plausible rule for climate change reduction schemes that the people running them will generally prioritize other political and economic objectives over actual emission reductions. This meshes together with other forms of wishful thinking, where we give ourselves credit for overly generous assumptions about reduced emissions, then find every possible way to cheat to reduce the stringency of the system.

The latest example:

As so often, I am reminded of Stephen Gardiner 5th and 6th propositions about climate ethics from 2011:

In the perfect moral storm, our position is not that of idealized neutral observers, but rather judges in our own case, with no one to properly hold us accountable. This makes it all too easy to slip into weak and self-serving ways of thinking, supported by a convenient apathy or ideological fervor. Moreover, the devices of such corruption are sophisticated, and often function indirectly, by infiltrating the terms of ethical and epistemic argument.

And:

Given this, we are susceptible to proposals for action that do not respond to the real problem. This provides a good explanation of what has gone wrong in the last two decades of climate policy, from Rio to Kyoto to Copenhagen. However, the form of such “shadow solutions” is likely to evolve as a the situation deteriorates. Some recent arguments for pursuing geoengineering may represent such an evolution.

It’s also reminiscent of Greta Thunberg this year:

You don’t listen to the science because you are only interested in solutions that will enable you to carry on like before. Like now. And those answers don’t exist any more. Because you did not act in time. Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.

No climate policy ever works as well as in an ideal case because those implementing it always have higher, more local, and more immediate priorities than the policy’s effectiveness at controlling climate change.

When I was at the Treasury Board Secretariat, for instance, I was told that when it came to the money the government was giving to car companies to supposedly improve their environmental performance it didn’t matter to us if there were any actual environmental benefits from what they were proposing, and it was similarly outside our mandate to consider whether the companies would have done the same things without the money.

We’re not coming at this like people determined to solve a problem. Instead, we’re acting like people who are being nagged to take action on a problem which we half-recognize but mostly just want to ignore. That meshes menacingly with how the problem keeps turning out to be more alarming than we feared, and where drastic action is necessary immediately to avoid catastrophe.

Open thread: 2019 federal election

The CBC is reporting on polling results pertinent to this fall’s federal election: CBC News poll takes snapshot of Canadians ahead of fall election.

They say the cost of living was the top concern identified, followed by climate change. This suggests a familiar Canadian dynamic: being notionally concerned about climate change, but rejecting action on the necessary scale because of a perceived threat to short-term economic growth and personal financial well-being.

This integrated nicely with Andrew Scheer’s Conservative climate plan, which follows the traditional formula of expressing concern about climate change, proposing only speculative and painless long-term measures to deal with it while insisting that the fossil fuel industry can keep growing, and vaguely hoping that the rest of the world will solve the problem while Canada changes little and continues to actively make it worse.

There’s so much about this election that is depressing: how Trudeau and his government have done a poor job but remain the only non-abominable party with a chance of winning, how the discussion on the left will largely remain a squabble about blocking each other which the progressive parties cannot overcome, and ultimately Canada being carried forward by inertia and the defenders of the status quo into an unliveable and chaotic future.

Open thread: conservative climate hawks

Conservatives have no more reason to want to destabilize the climate than anyone else, though the political right has largely become where those who deny the existence of or need to do anything about climate change can persist unrebuked and win converts.

A central view of mine these days is that it’s hopeless to pursue climate strategies which depend on progressive governments always being in power, since that’s not plausible for the foreseeable future in Canada, the United States, the UK, etc. Climate policies will need to be in place for decades, so in way way or another they need the ability to endure through at least centre-right if not full on right wing populist governments.

It was nice therefore to see former Prime Minister Kim Campbell criticize the lack of seriousness in Andrew Scheer’s no-targets climate plan. Our deliberations need to be as much as possible about the issues instead of party politics, and seeing voices on the right that accept the scientific consensus and are willing to call out inaction as unacceptable is necessary to build a sufficient political coalition to curb the damage we’re imposing on the planet.

On the cusp of the next Trans Mountain decision

Canadian politics has an unhealthy fixation on the profits associated with fossil fuel production and use. It’s the threat of losing those that is always evoked by pro-fossil interests when they are asserting that this or that piece of new fossil fuel infrastructure (this pipeline, that bitumen mine or in situ extraction project) needs to be built.

This analysis of course misses the climatic impacts on third parties. Oil advocates want to think of the transaction as just a happy buyer and a happy seller, ignoring the people losing their homes, financial security, and even their lives because the climatic stability that we have depended on for millennia is being disrupted and destabilized by fossil fuel use. These risks aren’t notional or set in the future, but happening now as this CBC article illustrates: ‘It’s a problem for society’: Climate change is making some homes uninsurable.

Tomorrow the Trudeau government is expected to announce the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion into B.C. Whether it is later stopped by public protest, the courts, or other means or not, I think it will cement the view that rather than trying to seek a sensible compromise the Trudeau Liberals chose a fundamentally incoherent strategy. It makes no sense to try to gently decrease economy-wide oil demand with a carbon price as a route to decarbonization while simultaneously approving projects that would only have a viable role in a future where we choose to ignore climate change. If we end up with an Andrew Scheer Conservative government it will be even worse, both for a fossil fuel industry which misunderstands the fundamental problem it is facing and to Canada’s economy as a whole, but that’s not necessarily enough to save Trudeau, especially while Canada’s relatively pro-decarbonization left is fragmented into support for Greens, the NDP, and Liberals.

Related:

Canada’s oil and pipeline controversy in a line

In an article called “Oilpatch in open rebellion as Ottawa ignores industry’s input on Bill C-69” Chris Varcoe notes:

The uproar over the bill came as CAPP released its annual outlook, forecasting oil production will grow by a tepid 1.4 per cent annually — less than half the pace anticipated five years ago — by 2035 with total output reaching almost 5.9 million barrels per day.

This is unhappy news for pro-oil advocates because Canada’s oil production is growing more slowly, and it is bad news for climate advocates because it is continuing to grow at a time when we desperately need it to shrink.

Phasing out an industry is never easy, but it’s necessary here. The alternative of unconstrained climate change is awful to contemplate, and would be a grave injustice to all those who will come after us and to non-human nature. If we want the world as a whole to dismantle the suicide pact which we have established through ever-rising fossil fuel production and use, countries like Canada cannot continue to hope to enlarge their fossil fuel industries. We have already taken way more than our fair share, and neither Canada nor any province in it has the right to demand any more.